You're Too Far-Close To Me (Personal Space Around the World)

So this week we will delve into proxemics, which is basically the study of personal space.


Personal space is (as the name would suggest) is a very personal topic and is very subjective from person to person, and is especially dependent on someone's relation to that person. Proxemics is an element of nonverbal communication, and just like all types of communication, it varies from culture to culture.


An article from the Washington Post written by Amanda Erickson summarized research published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology that was conducted among 9,000 people from 42 different countries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/24/how-close-is-too-close-depends-on-where-you-live/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2d2c4edd34a4

This is what they found:
These results were quite interesting but it also made me wonder more about how the United States and its melting pot-like nature could affect personal space among immigrant households over time. I would love to see further research (if it's not being conducted already) that tracked how someone's personal space boundaries shifted after they moved to a new country and how long it took to assimilate to the boundaries of their new country.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Research! Fun!

Image
So in class this week we learned about communication theories and research and then were tasked with carrying out research in our groups on different sound levels on and around campus. so let's talk about how it went! My group chose to stick together and have everyone go to all of our testing sites. While this seemed like a good idea because everyone could contribute to our observations, it also added an extra variable to the sites we tested since we are not the quietest bunch. I was in charge of the recordings (mainly because most people in the group hadn't bothered to download any of the apps) and I did have a hard time navigating the NIOSH app and understanding what all the results meant. Other people in my group were able to so we worked together to record all the info we needed. One thing that I found really interesting about all the places that we visited was that there wasn't really much of a difference in the average decibels, they were all in the 60-70 rang
Read more

Sniffing out "The One"

Image
An age-old problem faced by people is trying to find a romantic partner to spend your life with. This is an issue that has grown more complex with the 21st century and many dating sites have risen to the challenge of helping people find "The One" like Match.com,  Ok Cupid,  EHarmony and my personal favorite Clown Dating (clowns deserve love too!). Another interesting dating company is the aptly named Smell Dating operates off the idea that "your nose knows" and that humanities oldest sense has the ability to sniff out a compatible match. The way that the service works is after paying a fee of $25 they send you a shirt that you wear for 3 days in a row, with no deodorant or perfume, you ship it back to them and they send you back 10 shirts that have gotten the same smelly treatment and you respond with which scents you liked. If there is a mutual liking of odors Smell Dating will then provide contact info. I'll be honest my first reaction was : I d
Read more